"I know it is." Her eyes filled and she didn't wipe them. "I'm not asking you to make it smaller. Please don't make it smaller. If you make it smaller I'll let you, and then I'll have to live with that too."
Overhead, through the ceiling, faint, they could hear the murmur of the octopus book through Linnea's headphones. A woman's voice explaining, with great warmth, that an octopus has three hearts.
"You can't stay here tonight," he said.
"I know."
"I mean it. I don't think you'd hurt her again. I don't. But I don't know that, and I'm not going to bet her on it. And she shouldn't have to wake up tomorrow and wonder."
"I know. I was going to say it if you didn't." She picked up her phone and turned it over in her hands. "I can't drive."
"No."
"I already called Rosario," she said. "While you were upstairs. She's on the other line, she's waiting, she said call her back the second you came down. She said she's calling the intake line at the place outside Reading tonight to see if they have a bed tomorrow or Monday. If they don't, she knows a place in Harrisburg." She paused. "And I have to call the monitoring program. Tomorrow morning, first thing. I signed a contract. If I'm drinking, I have to self-report. If I don't and they find out, it's my license. If I do, it's probably still my license for a while. I'll be off work. Maybe a long time."
He knew about the program, a little. The state ran it for nurses and doctors and dentists and hygienists who had gotten into trouble with drugs or alcohol, a five-year contract of meetings and random urine screens and quarterly reports, and Noelle had been in it since the DUI. The DUI had been in the police log of the local paper. Endangering the welfare of a child, pleaded down. Ignition interlock, twelve months. She had kept her job because the dentist who owned the practice, a big soft-voiced man named Dr. Hostetter whose own brother had died of it, had sat her down and said, You do the program and I'll hold your chair.
"Do you want me to call Hedy?" he said.
Something moved across her face. Hedy was his older sister, a labor-and-delivery nurse at Lancaster General with three boys and a voice built for getting people to push. She had not been kind about the DUI. She had driven Linnea to preschool for a month and brought casseroles and never said anything cruel to Noelle's face. But she had said to Emery, in her own kitchen, with the door closed, I love her, Em, and I'm going to be watching her, and if it happens again I'm not going to be nice about it. And Noelle had known, because Noelle always knew.